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Once Upon A City: Toronto’s original firebrand leaves ‘spirited’ legacy

The historic downtown home of William Lyon Mackenzie — Toronto’s first mayor, newspaper publisher, writer and fiery rebel — still carries a ghostly allure even though it’s been decades since former caretakers reported incidents of haunting.

Today you can Google “Mackenzie House’’ and Georgian row house at 82 Bond St. will pop up on sites like The Toronto & Ontario Ghosts and Hauntings Research Society (www.torontoghosts.org ) along with allegations that it may be Toronto’s, and maybe Canada’s “most haunted’’ house.

The reputation for otherworldly events has its origins in a newspaper story from 1960 published in the now-defunct Toronto Telegram. Two sets of husband and wife caretakers — the Dobbans and the Edmunds — told a reporter they’d seen a short, “frock-coated’’ man, matching the description of Mackenzie, who died in the front master-bedroom on Aug. 28, 1861, age 66.

They also claimed to have seen the spectral figure of a woman, with long hair, and on one occasion this ghostly apparition apparently slapped one of the caretakers. In addition, apparently footsteps on the stairs were heard, the piano in the parlour played and there were printing press sounds.

The Toronto Daily Star ran an article on June 28, 1960, which derided the allegations: “Ghosts in Toronto? No, ghost writers.” It quoted officials from the Mackenzie Homestead Foundation, which then owned and operated the house as a museum, as admitting they “dreamed up” the story with the Telegram to drum up interest. Caretaker Alex Dobban appeared to backtrack on the tales of spirits, telling a Star reporter, “There’s nothing to it.”

Two days later, the Star published an interview with seven spiritualists who held a séance at Mackenzie House, newly built when Mackenzie moved in, in 1859, to try to contact the city’s first mayor “but the guest of honour failed to show up. He wasn’t even there in spirit.”

But it seems that once a ghost story is attached to a house, it never really goes away.

Not long after the original accounts from the caretakers, a Telegram reporter accompanied Anglican Archdeacon John Frank as he went through the house allegedly “exorcising’’ the spirits.

In late 1960, the City of Toronto acquired the house, which still operates as a museum. When the Foundation transferred ownership, it passed on an official inventory of contents, which included “one ghost (exorcised).’’

Various members of the media have also spent nights in the house over the years and supernatural experts have weighed in on the supposed spirits haunting it.

In 1988, Toronto Star reporter Catherine Dunphy visited the house “on a dark and stormy night’’ with Elizabeth Paddon, a self-proclaimed psychic clairvoyant and Ian Currie, a former university philosophy professor turned “ghostbuster.” Paddon apparently went into a trance and became the medium for the spirit of Mackenzie’s wife, Isabel Baxter Mackenzie. Currie claimed to have convinced her to move on to the world where her husband awaited.

Why the spirit of Isabel Mackenzie would linger is hard to understand. In real life, she seems to have been totally devoted to her husband. She came to Canada in 1822, accompanied by Mackenzie’s matchmaker mother, and they soon married. Isabel moved with her husband to various locations, often coping with financial privation during their marriage, including exile in the U.S. after the failed 1837 Upper Canada rebellion. She gave birth to 13 children, seven surviving childhood.

After Mackenzie died, Isabel lived on in the house for another 10 years, along with the couple’s daughters, Helen, Libby and Isabel Grace (the mother of future prime minister Mackenzie King). Then she moved elsewhere in Toronto and died in 1873.

Aside from its alleged ghostly entanglements, the house is fascinating on its own merits, as the last residence of one of Canada’s most fascinating citizens and original firebrand for democracy. Its historical site designation in 1936 saved it from the demolition fate of what was once a street of row houses.

The two-storey home, which has four living levels (a raised basement which houses the kitchen, a first level parlour and office area, second level bedrooms and third level, or attic, where a servant once resided (now administrative and closed to the public.) There was no indoor toilet in Mackenzie’s day, or electricity.

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An addition was put on the back of the house in 1967 to house the type of printing press and implements that Mackenzie and his staff would have used to print his newspaper (Colonial Advocate), which agitated for political reform and attacked the privileged Tory members of the Family Compact that dominated the government.

In his day, Mackenzie’s actual newspaper office was within walking distance of his house. He kept the paper going while he ran for election to the 10th Parliament of Upper Canada and won, taking his seat in 1829.

But while Mackenzie, and other Reformers, could advocate for change and denounce corruption, they had no power. The Lieutenant-Governor could essentially do what he wanted.

In 1834 Mackenzie ran for alderman in Toronto’s first municipal election and won. Council then voted him mayor.

In 1835 he was defeated in city elections and then briefly elected to the Legislative Assembly until being defeated in the 1836 election. He then founded a new newspaper, the Constitution, dedicated to reform. Mackenzie, and others, wanted the Lieutenant-Governor to be bound by the wishes of the elected assembly — responsible, democratic government.

By late 1837 Mackenzie had convinced other Reformers that armed resistance was the only way to achieve reform. The rebels skirmished with government troops in early December but by Dec. 7, they had given up. Despite a “wanted’’ proclamation (one is framed and on the wall in Mackenzie House) offering a generous one thousand pounds for the capture of Mackenzie — one of the “malignant and disloyal” rebels, he and many others managed to escape.

Farmers Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews weren’t as lucky and were caught and hanged for treason in 1838 for their part in the rebellion.

After he fled, Mackenzie declared a provisional government from the U.S. but was convicted of being in violation of U.S. neutrality laws and spent a year in prison. He had 10 years of sometimes sporadic employment.

After being pardoned he returned to Canada in 1849 and was elected to the legislative assembly, retiring in 1857 when he accepted the Bond St. house as a sort of payment from supporters, for all he had endured in his quest for democratic reform.

There are some actual artifacts in the home related to the Mackenzies (a rocking chair, an embroidered slipper chair in the parlour, a stitched sampler made by Isabel Baxter when she was 13. Paintings of Mackenzie and his wife hang on the main level, the dates of which are not known, says Bruce Beaton, a historical interpreter at the house, but they “might have been painted as early as 1828 when he was first elected (to the legislative assembly).’’

Outside the side of the house, there is a piece of a commissioned arch, which had been erected in the 1930s at Niagara Falls to commemorate the 1837 rebellion. Mackenzie’s grandson, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had officiated. The arch was later demolished except for this panel, brought to the Bond St. property in the 1980s.

According to historian Chris Raible, who has written extensively on Mackenzie, the words on the inscription honouring the “pioneers of freedom” came from Mackenzie King. Raible says King, a firm believer in communication with the dead, kept detailed diaries and in March 1937 he revealed the words he wrote for the arch had direct input from his famous grandfather. King referred to it as an inscription dictated “from the skies’’… from “the Invisible.”

As Raible puts it: “There may be no ghost at Mackenzie House, but the words on the commemorative panel in the garden were apparently ghost written!”

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